I do not know whether anybody, including the editor himself, has ever noticed a peculiar coincidence which may be found in the arrangement of the lyrics in Sir Francis Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.  However that may be, two poems, each of them extremely well known, are placed side by side, and their juxtaposition represents one vast revolution in the poetical manner of looking at things.  The first is Goldsmith’s almost too well known

    “When lovely woman stoops to folly,
    And finds too late that men betray,
    What charm can soothe her melancholy? 
    What art can wash her guilt away?”

Immediately afterwards comes, with a sudden and thrilling change of note, the voice of Burns:—­

    “Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon,
      How can ye bloom sae fair? 
    How can ye chant, ye little birds,
      And I sae fu’ of care?

    Thou’ll break my heart, thou bonny bird,
      That sings upon the bough,
    Thou minds me of the happy days
      When my fause Love was true.”

A man might read those two poems a great many times without happening to realise that they are two poems on exactly the same subject—­the subject of a trusting woman deserted by a man.  And the whole difference—­the difference struck by the very first note of the voice of any one who reads them—­is this fundamental difference, that Goldsmith’s words are spoken about a certain situation, and Burns’s words are spoken in that situation.

In the transition from one of these lyrics to the other, we have a vital change in the conception of the functions of the poet; a change of which Burns was in many ways the beginning, of which Browning, in a manner that we shall see presently, was the culmination.

Goldsmith writes fully and accurately in the tradition of the old historic idea of what a poet was.  The poet, the vates, was the supreme and absolute critic of human existence, the chorus in the human drama; he was, to employ two words, which when analysed are the same word, either a spectator or a seer.  He took a situation, such as the situation of a woman deserted by a man before-mentioned, and he gave, as Goldsmith gives, his own personal and definite decision upon it, entirely based upon general principles, and entirely from the outside.  Then, as in the case of The Golden Treasury, he has no sooner given judgment than there comes a bitter and confounding cry out of the very heart of the situation itself, which tells us things which would have been quite left out of account by the poet of the general rule.  No one, for example, but a person who knew something of the inside of agony would have introduced that touch of the rage of the mourner against the chattering frivolity of nature, “Thou’ll break my heart, thou bonny bird.”  We find and could find no such touch in Goldsmith.  We have to arrive at the conclusion therefore, that the vates or poet in his absolute capacity is defied and overthrown by this new method of what may be called the songs of experience.